Chapter 23
The Life We Choose
They called it Sunday Talk, and it began as a joke.
It was Sarah's idea, in the first week of January, over a plate of toast. She had read it somewhere, she said. It was a thing that couples did, in books with pastel covers and titles like Hold Me Tight. You sat down once a week, at a fixed time, and each of you said the thing that you had not said. It could be big. It could be tiny. It could be, I'm tired of the way you stack the mugs. It could be, I was afraid on Wednesday and didn't tell you. The rule was that you did not argue. You just listened, and said thank you, and went on with your day.
"It's very American," said Daniel.
"We are American."
"It sounds like a committee."
"It sounds like a rule. You like rules."
"I like our rules. I like, this sounds like it's got a form."
"It's got a very simple one." She held up a finger. "One. We do it on Sunday. Two. We make pancakes first, because nobody's honest on an empty stomach. Three. Nobody's allowed to say I'm fine."
"What if I'm fine?"
"Then you say I'm fine, for real, I checked."
"That's a lot of paperwork."
"I'm a librarian," said Sarah. "I'm very good at paperwork."
They held the first one on the twelfth, in her kitchen, at ten in the morning. It took four minutes. He said that he did not like it when she ate the last bit of toast without asking. She said that she did not like it when he apologized before he'd done anything. They looked at each other, in the pale window light, with syrup on their fingers, and both of them, helplessly, began to laugh.
"That's it?" said Daniel.
"That's all I've got."
"That was easy."
"It's the first one."
"I thought it'd be, I had a speech. I thought we'd cry."
"We can, next week," said Sarah. "I'll book it."
It turned out to be harder than that.
There were Sundays when one of them said a thing that landed badly, and the other went quiet, and they sat across the table with their forks down, and the pancakes cooling, and a kind of terrible polite hush. There were Sundays when she said, unexpectedly, I had a bad dream about him, and I didn't tell you, and he said, thank you, and got up, and went to the window. There were Sundays when he said, I was jealous of Josh again, and she said, you can't be, he's moved to Denver, and he said, I know. It's not about Josh. It was strange. It was not a bit like the books. But it was true, and once a week, in a warm kitchen, for an hour, there was a place where nothing could be hidden, and nothing was held against you.
It's a drawer, she thought, once, watching him.
It's the one drawer that we both agreed to keep open.
The house was the thing that surprised her.
It was not a house. It was an apartment, a pleasant, rambling one on the second floor of a converted Victorian on Grove Street, with a bay window and a bad stove. They found it in March. They had not been looking. She had said, one night, over soup, that her lease was up in June, and he had said, rather too quickly, "Do you want to move?" and she had said, "I don't know. Do you?" And there had been a pause. They had both stared into the soup.
"I think I'd like a, I'd like to be somewhere that has a garage," said Daniel.
"For the bikes."
"For the bikes. And the dog. He's, there's a stair. He's getting old."
"He's four."
"He's four in dog years and sixty in sadness."
"Daniel."
"Yes?"
"Are you asking me to move in with you?"
"No," said Daniel. "I'm asking if you'd like us to look at a place. That's different. If we hate it, we, there's no obligation. We can say we're browsing."
"Browsing."
"For a, it's like a library."
"You're doing a bit."
"I'm doing a large bit," said Daniel, and put down his spoon, and went pink. "I'm sorry. I'm nervous. I'd like to ask, I'd like it to be the real question, and I'd like you to know that you can say no. I'd like us to be, I'd like to want it for the same reason."
"What reason?"
"That it's nice," said Daniel. "That I'd rather come home to you than not."
She did not say anything.
She sat there, in her yellow kitchen, with a spoon in her hand and the light on her face, and felt it go through her in a long slow wave. It was not fear. She waited, with great interest, to find out. It was something she had no word for, a warm, steady, uncomplicated yes, that came up out of the floor.
"Okay," said Sarah.
"Okay?"
"Don't say it like that. You sound like me." She laughed. "I'd like to look. I'd like to, I think I'd like to want it too. I need to check." She put her hand over his. "Can we say I'm checking?"
"I'll put it in the minutes."
They looked at six apartments. They hated four. One had a smell. One had a landlord who followed them from room to room, talking about a plumbing system with such rapture that Daniel had to excuse himself. And on the fifth, on a bright March afternoon, with the windows open and the maple outside the bay going into red bud, she stood in the middle of a bare front room, in the sun, with her arms folded, and felt the whole of herself go still.
"It's got a good light," she said.
"It does."
"And that radiator's, it's an old one. It sounds like a man clearing his throat."
"I like it."
"I could put the bowls on the mantel."
"There's a mantel?"
"It's a fireplace. It's got a real mantel." She turned. She was smiling. "Daniel."
"Yes."
"It's very nice."
"It is," he said. He was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets, and his face had gone solemn. He looked about eighteen. "I keep thinking it's a trick. That I'll wake up."
"I do too."
"Is that all right?"
"It's the most normal thing in the world," said Sarah. "I think that's what's so strange."
She did not leave her own place right away.
They had agreed on that. It was her condition, and he had accepted it at once, without a murmur, and the speed with which he did so had, she thought, been the best of all possible answers. She kept the apartment on Pearl until June. She slept at Grove Street four nights a week, and at home on the others, in her own bed, with her own radiator, and her own crooked bowls. She did it on purpose. She wanted a door that was hers. She wanted, now and then, on a Tuesday, to sit alone in a yellow kitchen, with a crossword, and no one to ask her how she was.
He understood. That was what undid her. He said, on the first of those nights, at the door of his own apartment, with a book under his arm and his hair on end, "Is it okay? If I don't call?"
"What?"
"If I don't call. I'd like to. But I'd like to not. I think, I'd like us to try it. A night where I don't know." His eyes were very bright. "I think I need to find out that I can."
"Are you sure?"
"No."
"Then why?"
"Because it's the only way I'll find out," said Daniel. "I think it's the thing I have to learn."
She did not answer. She kissed him. And she drove home through the quiet spring dark, with the window down and the smell of lilacs coming in, and was in her own kitchen at ten past ten before she remembered that she had not sent a text.
She picked up the phone.
Home, she wrote. Safe. Warm. Unreplaced.
She looked at it. She did not send it. She deleted it, and then, after a moment, as one gives a small tribute to a good habit, she typed it again, and added a heart, and sent it before she could think. She did not wait. She went to put the kettle on.
At 10:26, a reply came.
i didn't call. i didn't text. i did the dishes and walked the dog. it was awful. i feel great.
So do I, she wrote. I think I'm free.
i think so too. i love you. goodnight.
She did not answer at once.
She stood by the kettle with the phone in her hand, in the yellow light, with steam rising by her cheek. It was a quiet room. She heard the radiator. She heard, very faintly, through the window, a car go by in the street, and a woman laughing on the sidewalk. And she thought, simply, with a strange, calm certainty, that the thing she had been waiting for was not a thing that happened at a moment. It was something that had been going on, in the next room, for months.
She wrote it.
I love you too.
She sent it. And she stood there, a small woman in a gray sweatshirt, in the kitchen of an old brick building, on a Tuesday night in April, with her hand over her mouth, alone, and wept for joy.
It had not been a grand occasion. There had been no music. She had been standing next to a kettle. But it was the first time she had said it to a man without being afraid, and she knew, at once, clearly, that she would remember it all her life.
He found that he could do things.
It was a surprise. He had not known. For so long he had thought of himself as a man who was shut, who sat still at the end of a road. And now, little by little, in the spring, he found that when he put his hand out, a thing was there. He asked his department head, in a nervous voice, for the use of the science wing on Saturdays, and was told yes. He ran a camp. It was a small one, six weeks, in July, with twelve children and a rocket kit. He wrote the grant himself, in four nights, with Sarah reading over his shoulder, saying you don't need that sentence, and that's the best bit, and just say what you want.
He said what he wanted.
It was an odd thing. He wrote, We want children who think they can't do science to discover that they can. He wrote, We want to be the room where it happens. He read it back, in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon, in the bay window, and felt his ears go hot, and Sarah said, "That's very, that's you."
"It's embarrassing."
"It's honest."
"It's a bit much."
"It's much the way you are," said Sarah. "It's a very good grant."
They got it.
He read the letter in the staff room, at lunch, with a sandwich in one hand, and stood up so quickly that the chair fell over. He called her, in the middle of the library's busiest hour, and she answered on the first ring, whispering, Daniel, I'm at the desk, and he said, in a voice that cracked with joy, we got the money, and she gave a shriek that could be heard in the stacks.
And she was getting on, too.
She was doing a degree. It was a part-time one, online, in library science, at a university two states away, and she did it at night, at the kitchen table, in a pair of reading glasses that she was ashamed of. She had applied in January, on an impulse, and told no one but him. It had been a very large secret. She had sat for an hour, over the form, with her hand on the mouse. I'm not going to get in, she had said. I'm twenty-eight. They'll want a person who's.
"Who's what?" said Daniel.
"Who's, I don't know. Who's ready."
"You're ready."
"It's, I've never, I've never done a thing like this. On my own."
"It's not on your own. I'm here."
"Not for the exams."
"I'm here for the snacks," said Daniel.
She had pressed the button.
She had got in. She had stood in the hall at the Eastside Branch, with her phone in her hand, and read the email, and sat down on the floor, and Tessa, coming round the corner with a stack of picture books, had dropped them all and said, what is it? What's happened? Who's dead? And Sarah had said, no one. I got in, and Tessa had burst into tears and sat down beside her, and they had stayed there for twenty minutes among the fallen books, holding each other, rocking, while a small boy in a dinosaur costume stood over them and said, with grave and mounting impatience, "Excuse me. Where do the T. rexes go?"
There was a night in May, though, that she thought of afterward as the real one.
It was a Thursday. It was the library board hearing. It had been coming for weeks. The city had proposed to cut the Eastside Branch's budget by forty percent, which meant the children's room, and the story hour, and a good part of her job. It was a very ordinary sort of threat. There would be a meeting. There would be a vote. And somebody would have to stand up in a public hall, in front of a table of tired people in sensible shoes, and say why a picture book mattered.
It was going to be Sarah.
She had not wanted it. She had said so, to Tessa, who had said, I'll do it, and been shouted down, in the nicest possible way, by every other member of staff. You're the one they know, they said. You've got the voice. She had gone home and been sick. She had sat on her bathroom floor with a damp cloth on her neck, and Daniel had sat beside her, with his back to the tub, not saying a word.
"I could write it for you," he said, at last.
"I know."
"I could stand beside you. I could, I'd come. I'd hold the, I'll take a day off. I'd carry the posters."
"I know you would."
"Do you want me to?"
She considered it. She put her head back against the wall, and looked at the ceiling, where there was a long brown stain, in the shape of a country. She thought about it seriously. It was a real offer. It was a good one. It was exactly what he would do. And she could feel, in the quiet of the little bathroom, the whole wide gentle machinery of his love, ready to go, with its arms out.
"No," said Sarah.
"Okay."
"I want to do it by myself."
"Okay."
"But I'd like you in the front row."
He did not move.
"It's a, I know it's a strange thing to ask. I want to do it alone, and I want you to be there. I want to look down and see your face." She turned her head. "Is that, can you do that? Can you sit there and not, you can't mouth the words."
"I'd never."
"You'd want to."
"I'd want to," said Daniel. "I'd want to very much."
"Can you not?"
"I can try."
"You can sit on your hands."
"I'll do it," said Daniel. "I'll sit on my hands. I'll be so quiet. I'll be the quietest man in the front row."
She laughed. She put her head on his shoulder. And she thought, for the first time, clearly, how very much it cost him. It was not the kind of thing that anybody saw. A man sat in a chair with his hands under his thighs. It looked like nothing. It looked like a person at a meeting. But she knew, as she leaned against him, in the little bathroom, what it was to him. It was the whole of his nature, held down. It was a dog that had been told to stay.
He's doing it, she thought.
He's doing it because I asked.
And he's not doing it to be good.
She went to the hearing on the Thursday.
She wore the yellow dress, and her father's blue scarf, and she walked to the front of a high, cold, echoing hall, with a sheaf of notes in her hand. It was crowded. There was a table of seven people in gray. She had never seen so many chairs. She stood at a little wooden podium, with a microphone that squealed, and looked down, and in the very front row, at the end, there was a man in a blue shirt, with his hands under his legs.
He did not smile. He did not wave. He sat there with his back straight and his chin up and his eyes on her face, steady, with an expression she could not have described. He was not telling her anything. He was not helping. He was only there, like a lamp in a window, burning quietly, a thing that she could look at and go on.
She put down her notes.
She did not use them. She looked at the tired seven, and said, in a clear, plain, rather shaking voice, "I'd like to tell you about a boy in a dinosaur costume."
She talked for six minutes.
She did not remember most of it. It came out of her like water. She told them about a T. rex, and a grandmother, and a note in crayon. She told them about a girl who had said that a bear was lying. She said that a library was the last place in the city where a child could walk in off the street and be told, by a stranger, that she was allowed to be sad. She said that it cost forty thousand dollars a year, and that it was the cheapest thing she had ever seen.
When she stopped, there was a silence.
Then somebody, at the back, started to clap.
She looked down. The man in the blue shirt had his hands over his face. He was not clapping. He had not moved. He was sitting very still, in the front row, with his palms against his eyes, and his shoulders shaking, and she saw a tear go down his wrist.
He kept his word, she thought.
He sat on them.
She stood there, at the podium, in a roar of applause, and looked at him, and could not stop smiling. They won, in the end. It was seven to nothing, with one abstention. But what she remembered, afterward, was not the vote. It was a man in a front row, weeping into his own hands, and obeying.
They were on the porch, that night, at midnight.
It was a small one, on Grove Street, with a swing and a rail and a pot of geraniums. It was warm. The street was quiet. They sat on the boards, with their feet on the step, and a bottle of cheap champagne between them that Tessa had pushed into Sarah's hands at the door. Pickles lay at their feet. The sky was full of low soft stars.
"You didn't say anything," said Sarah.
"No."
"Not a word."
"I nearly did. At the, when you got to the part about the crayon." He turned the bottle. "I was going to shout yes."
"I'd have killed you."
"I know." He grinned. "I held on. I had my, I sat on both hands. They've got a dent. I think I've got a pattern of the chair."
"Was it hard?"
"It was the hardest thing I've ever done."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to take it from you." He was looking at the dark street. His voice was slow. "I wanted to make it, I wanted to stand up there and say it for you. I wanted it to be easy. I think I've always wanted that. I think that's the thing. I look at you, and I think, I'll carry it. And I'll stand there, and I'll hold it all." He paused. "And I've been so wrong. I've been wrong the whole time."
"How?"
"Because it wasn't mine."
She said nothing.
"I thought love was, I thought it meant not letting anything happen. To the person. I thought if you loved someone, you stood in front of the, you took it. You made it so it wouldn't hurt." He gave a small shaky laugh. "And you sat there. At the podium. You were so scared. I could see it. Your hands. And I thought, I'll just, I could go up. And I thought, no."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd have missed it."
"Missed what?"
"That you could," said Daniel. "That you could do the thing. By yourself. It would've been a gift, and you'd have been, you'd have been grateful, and you'd never have known." He looked at her. "I think the kindest thing I've ever done was sit there with my hands under my legs."
"It was."
"It felt awful."
"It always does," said Sarah. "I think that's how you know."
She took the bottle. She drank from it, with her head back, and the wine was sweet and cold and foolishly bubbly. She passed it to him. He drank. And she leaned back against the post, and put her feet up on the rail, and looked up at the sky, which was very large.
"I'm going to tell you something," she said. "For Sunday Talk. I'm saying it early."
"Okay."
"I thought that I'd be afraid of this. The whole way. I thought, if I ever had it, I'd spend every day waiting for it to stop." She lowered her eyes. "And I'm not. I just wanted to say. It's so, it's so ordinary. I'm not waiting. I'm just, I'm living in it. It's like finding out that you can breathe underwater."
"That's a good one."
"I stole it from a book."
"It's a good one anyway."
"I love you," said Sarah.
She said it without a pause. It came out as easily as a yawn. He had been about to drink, and he stopped, with the bottle in the air.
"I know," said Daniel.
"You know?"
"You said it in April."
"I know I said it. I'd like to say it again. I want to say it a lot. I want to say it until it's boring."
"It'll never be boring."
"It'd better not be," said Sarah, and laughed, and put her head on his shoulder, and a small three-legged dog sighed and rolled over and put his chin on both their shoes, and somewhere far off in the warm dark, a train went by, and the sound of it was long and low and unhurried, like something going home.